Your publisher asked for a blurb, but I don't do those anymore having given thousands in the past, and thus having laid myself open to requests for thousands more. However, please count me among your great admirers. You are an absolute first-rate ethnographer in describing survival schemes within chaos which only politicians would be cynical enough to call a society. You have written an important book, and must know it -- and must know, too, that you are in a ghetto. What are you? A writer of thrillers, right? Meanwhile, there are all these serious writers, describing America as it really is. Shall I name some of them? Would you like me to send you some of their wonderful books?
[The postscript:] Here's a trade secret maybe nobody ever told you: The more highly educated and powerful your characters, the more popular your books will be.
A letter from Kurt Vonnegut to Charles Willeford, dated 13 August 1985

Waiting for the Physio

Margaret was a tiny self-contained woman with silver hair, gold earrings, striped trousers and a pale mauve body-warmer. Perhaps she had been a beauty, but her chin was doubtful now and there was crazy-paving around her eyes. Tiny feet, well-shod in leather lace-up shoes.

Grace was over-weight and all her parts were subject to more than a fair share of gravity. There had been an attempt to dye her hair, but the scalp was ever-visible beneath it. A suite of bags had formed a colony under her eyes and her arms hung like broken branches from her shoulders. She had not attended to herself since waking that morning, or for a longer period before that. Like Margaret, she was well-shod, in shoes that did not look English, perhaps German or Italian, also in leather with tiny studs in the soles, laced-up flatties.

The walls of the waiting room were festooned with notices and charts showing how simple exercises could keep a body active and alive.

“Once she married him,” Grace said, “it was never going to be a walk in the park. What’s the daughter called?”

“Celia. She’s living with a man, used to be married to someone else and his wife and kids live in the same street, few doors away. Marjorie says there’s days he comes home from work and walks right past Celia’s door and goes to his old house. And Celia, she gets upset but she makes excuses for him, says he’s tired after a days work, not thinking.”

“Not capable of thinking, more like. Sounds like that.”

“And Celia, she suffers from vaginal dryness, has to use a gel made from kiwi fruit, extract of kiwi fruit. Marjorie says it makes life possible but she’s still dry, you know what I mean? Creamy but dry.”

“I can’t stand them,” Grace said. “Kiwi fruit. All those black seeds, get lodged under your teeth.” She moved her feet to allow a man with a belly to squeeze past. “Give me a banana any day.”

I do enjoy these glimpses, prose doodles, whatever you want to call them, John. They feel like things overheard, scenes witnessed and recorded. Meaning they meet Elmore Leonard’s golden rule of writing, which is to say it’s writing but it doesn’t look or sound like writing.

(Last line of the first paragraph possibly isn’t needed, mind, if I can be critical.)